Glenn Otis Brown Returns to Creative Commons as Board Member

Eric Steuer, July 24th, 2009

We are thrilled to announce that Glenn Otis Brown has joined the Creative Commons board of directors.

Brown was CC’s executive director from 2002-2005; as one of the core members of the CC team in our early days, he was critical in developing projects that provide the groundwork for the work we do today. Brown is currently YouTube’s music business development manager and works with major and independent labels, publishers, and artists to build new business opportunities. In the press release we issued today to publicize this news, Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito says this of Brown:

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Glenn join the board. As Executive Director of the organization in its early days, Glenn established many of the critical ideas and relationships that CC is built upon today. That background, combined with his experience in developing creative projects and partnerships at YouTube, gives him particularly valuable insight into the opportunities for Creative Commons in the worlds of business, media, and culture at large.”

A few months ago, we celebrated YouTube’s decision to offer an .mp4 download of Creative Commons videos (for some partner accounts). The idea behind it, was to allow people to remix these CC videos, so Youtube was now offering the mp4 files to whomever was interested.

However, that was useless.

See, the MP4 files offered for download are so terribly compressed, that makes them useless for remixes in a good quality. I emailed Youtube about this, and asked them to offer the ORIGINALLY uploaded file instead of their super-compressed MP4 files. They declined that, and said that this won’t happen.

As a CC videographer myself, I find this “MP4 download” extremely useless for CC purposes. It’s like Youtube wanted to play nice just for the , and threw us BONES, not meat.

So, yeah, first they throw us bones, and now they get a board of directors seat. Sorry, but you should have pushed youtube to offer original downloads before you gave them a seat. Even if we videographers had to pay a small fee to recuperate for bandwidth costs.

This is why I still use Vimeo for my videos: http://vimeo.com/eugenia/videos
Because I can offer to others my content in a true CC manner: the originally uploaded files, low on compression.

Just responding to make it clear that it’s not YouTube that got a seat on the Creative Commons board; CC’s former executive director, who is one of the most important people involved in the development of CC, did. He works at YouTube – and does a lot of great work there – but will not be representing them in his role as a CC board member.

Also, I checked out your videos on Vimeo. Thanks for the link – they’re really great. And you chose an awesome license to publish them under.